


tell me, get my shit together

by paperclipbitch



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, Mild Injury, Mild Language, Mild Peril, Post-Movie, Reluctant Bros, Run-On Sentences, Sabacc, Shenanigans, Slow Burn, everyone is terrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 03:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14782502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: “I thought we were actively avoiding each other after the Trandosha Shitshow,” Han says.“We’re actively avoiding each other after the Iridonia Shitshow,” Lando corrects him, “the Trandosha Shitshow is That Which We Do Not Speak Of.”





	tell me, get my shit together

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Ridin' Solo_ by Jason Derulo, #sorrynotsorry]
> 
> Set between the end of _Solo_ and the beginning of _A New Hope_ , and is universe-canon-compliant in that if you flick it with a fingernail it'll fall over rather than imploding. There's a lot about Wookiee linguistics in here (don't look at me, it just happened) which is pretty much accurate, but I've built on it. I've elected not to use the _Star Wars_ swearwords, though, because I haven't got a handle on them yet.
> 
> If you haven't seen _Solo_ or don't want to, you can pretty much still read this anyway - it's not exactly spoiler-free, but there's only a couple of allusions to ~events.

When he was a kid – okay, okay, Han was never exactly a kid, but when he was shorter and it was harder to get served in bars – Han imagined that the universe was a giant place full of options, impossibly, unimaginably large, like he could run and run and never look back.

Turns out that was a load of bantha shit, because the galaxy is a small-ass place.

Lando’s carefully sculpted eyebrows raise to his hairline and drop again, which Han unfortunately knows him well enough to interpret that Lando is pissed, but he turns his attention back to the sabacc cards in his hand. They’re probably not the cards he was dealt at the beginning of the game, but Han’s not here to interfere with that – he actually just wanted to get a damn drink to celebrate a job done, if not exactly _well_ , not entirely shambolically. 

“No buy-ins,” Lando announces, just loud enough to indicate that he’s talking to Han, not any of the players at the table with him. “This kid is terrible,” he adds, “just can’t stop cheating. It’s a compulsion really, he nearly lost a couple of fingers the last time I saw him play.” His expression is trying for virtuous, and falling pretty far short.

A mean-looking couple of Sullustans turn suspicious gazes on Han, and he holds up his hands and tries for virtuous himself.

“Hey,” Han protests, “I’m just here to get a drink with the big guy, I didn’t even know you were on this planet.”

Lando’s expression changes entirely. “Chewbacca’s here?”

Chewie himself chooses this moment to lumber into the bar, already bitching because Han hasn’t gotten the drinks in yet, and Lando immediately finishes raking in his winnings and gets up from the table.

Han dubiously watches as Lando turns his back on the pot entirely and embraces Chewie with every sign of doing it deliberately, and not to slide a knife between his ribs or anything.

“ _He_ gets a _hug_?” he demands. Chewie shrugs, and mumbles his reply. “He is not a friend!” Han adds.

Lando rolls his eyes before turning to Chewie and carefully articulating what passes for a formal greeting in Shyriiwook; his accent is dreadful and it basically sounds like he’s gargling with sand, but Han can’t even enjoy laughing at him before Chewie responds with equal politeness.

Han thinks his head might be about to explode.

“Why- why would you learn to speak Wookiee?” he demands.

Chewie tells Han he’s being unnecessarily rude, but Han isn’t, actually. Lando shrugs. “Chewbacca’s a friend,” he replies, “why wouldn’t I learn to communicate with him?” He waves a hand at the disinterested Twi’lek bartender. “Hey, man, put my friend Chewbacca on my tab, ‘kay?” He grins at Han. “Besides, Shyriiwook is a great language, don’t you think?”

He and Chewie disappear toward the bar and the brightly-coloured bottles of booze that look increasingly appealing right now, leaving Han to trudge bitterly behind them, muttering: “yeah, great, over a hundred and fifty words for ‘wood’ and you can’t make a decent dick joke out of any of them,” as he does.

-

Despite the image he’s trying frantically to project across the galaxy, Han’s not actually an entirely heartless bastard _all_ of the time.

“I let him keep the capes,” he reminds Chewie, the next time his friend his giving him the _Lando is not the worst, actually, you just like claiming he is_ speech. For a guy who mostly sticks to grunting and punching when he’s out and about, Chewie is surprisingly verbose once you live in a smallish enclosed space with him and spend very few hours apart. He’s also _tidy_ , which is maddening.

Han and Chewie have worked out a thing, where Chewie goes along with what Han says will happen, and then, when it doesn’t, Chewie will mop up the pieces of what does, in fact, happen, and save both their lives, and only growl _I told you so_ maybe six to eight times when they’re safely back on the _Falcon_ and everyone’s bleeding has been safely patched up; and, if while all this is happening, they come across any Wookiees who are in need of help, then Chewie can drop everything to go help them, and Han will not bitch, and he will provide back-up or explosives or at least stand at a safe distance yelling “bang” in what is intended to be a helpful manner.

It’s worked out pretty well, overall, and Han’s grasp of Shyriiwook is getting better by the day; he’s nearly got the pluperfect down and everything.

“He didn’t appreciate _having_ her,” he adds, because Chewie is continuing to look vaguely disapproving, like he does every time they run into Lando, despite the fact Lando continues to be way more of a scoundrel than Han is – admittedly not for lack of trying, Lando got the head start there – and spends on tailoring more than Han thinks he took last year. “The _Falcon_ needs to fly, Chewie, properly fly, not just do polite little runs so it doesn’t rattle his closets.”

It’s possible that Han is being unfair, and also a little petulant, but he could be being much worse.

Chewie points out that at least when Lando owned this ship, it was clean, and flaps a hand at the latest set of scuffs from Han slouching on the couch without taking his boots off. Han never had a mom, but if he had, and she’d been terrifyingly tall and hella hairy and weirdly specific about hygiene, then he guesses she’d have been just like Chewbacca.

“When I first met you, you were living in a mud cave,” Han reminds him. “This is definitely much, much better. Besides, you know, we’re the not-exactly-bad-but-definitely-neutral guys! We need a few scratches, a few dents, a few caf-cup rings on the tables, you know?”

Chewie has been gathering mugs with a look of great suffering, and departs off toward their galley with a grumble that Han catches nonetheless.

“Awesome smugglers don’t use coasters!” he calls after him. “Ask anyone!”

-

On the plus side, he’s stuck on a desert planet, Han muses, because at least he doesn’t have to deal with frostbite and/or shrinkage, both of which would just be _awkward_ right now.

It’s not like he’s not been in a prison cell before – Han’s been in so many cells by now that he’s got a definitive ranking from best to worst, which Chewie has long stopped listening to when Han decides it’s time to recite it again – and this one’s not bad, exactly: it’s pretty clean and there’s a small window and decent ventilation and the walls aren’t lined with terrifying spikes or anything. Han wouldn’t actually mind his hopefully brief incarceration if it weren’t for the fact they stripped him on entry and then didn’t give him his clothes back. Or any clothes back. They even found and confiscated his lockpicks, which is just _rude_ ; it takes time to work those up there.

Still, Han’s decided to be loosely confident that he’s not going to be here too long, because while there are a half-dozen prices on his head and the crime syndicates keep bickering over who’s going to actually get to horribly murder him, well, he’s just a lucky son-of-a-bitch, isn’t he. He’ll make it out of here.

Besides, Lando says you’re not anyone until at least one woman in the galaxy wants to skin you alive and then turn that skin into a fashionable evening gown with pockets and an optional demi-cape. Han assumes that he’d know, after all.

There’s a jingling sound at the end of the corridor and Han tips his head up, hoping that means it’s dinner or maybe a guard he can try to sweet-talk. Instead, a pair of painfully shiny shoes come into view, and Han briefly wonders if he’s developing weird telepathic skills.

“Well,” Lando says cheerfully. “Well, well, well.”

“Lovely to see you, as always,” Han responds, a parody of politeness. “I see they let you keep your clothes – did you bore them so much about the tailoring on your shirt they gave up on taking it off you?”

Lando grins with every single one of his teeth. “Oh, I’m not a prisoner here, Han.” He takes a hand out of his pocket and reveals a little shiny blue cylinder that Han immediately recognises as one of the keys the guards use. When he sees Han recognises it, Lando’s grin gets, somehow, even wider. “Turns out the jailers here are bored out of their _minds_ , and just can’t resist a game of chance.”

“Oh,” Han says, “fucking fuck. Fucking fucking fucking _fuck_.”

That grin is basically a sentient creature on its own now. “Turns out it doesn’t take much incentive to get the guards to start wagering their prisoners. It’s terrible, really. Someone should report them.”

“Leave me here to rot,” Han suggests desperately. “I’ll just live here now, it’s fine. They have a bunch of great local customs, probably.”

Lando presses the key into the lock, and the forcefield around the cell wavers and vanishes. “Come on, Han.”

“Can I at least have your cape?” Han asks. 

“No,” Lando replies. “You see this shade of purple? The dye came from the mines on only one planet, and the Empire took it over, you know how the story goes. You can’t get fabric in this colour anymore.”

“I’m naked!” Han reminds him.

“You’re _grimy_ ,” Lando corrects him, waving an impatient arm until Han reluctantly gets to his feet and steps into the corridor with him. “Don’t panic, it’s not anything I haven’t seen before.”

Han frowns. “You haven’t seen it before,” he says.

It’s Lando’s turn to frown now. “I haven’t?” he checks, and looks bemused when Han shakes his head. “It’s been, like, years, I just assumed we’d slept together by now.”

“Nope,” Han says, and, resigning himself to the fact that Lando really _isn’t_ going to give him anything to at least feign modesty with, starts walking toward the door at the end of the row of cells.

“Huh,” Lando murmurs, and then follows, shoes clicking smartly on the floor. “Anyway, it’s not far back to _your_ ship, you’ll survive.”

Han’s got nothing to be ashamed of, thank you very much, but even so: “are you punishing me for something here, Calrissian?”

“Me?” Lando presses a hand to the amber silk of his shirt. “Punishing you? Would I do a thing like that?” Han spreads his hands, shrugs. “Remember when we got drunk in that shitty bar on Lothal, and you decided to tell me about when you and your little Crimson Dawn girl decided to get hot and heavy in _my personal cape closet_ , and I asked you if you held nothing sacred and then you laughed until you fell off your chair?”

Han considers this. It does sound like something he would do, frankly.

“…no,” he hazards.

“Well then,” Lando says, and there’s that grin again, “I’m not punishing you for anything.” He pushes open the door, and outside there’s sunlight and what sounds like half the population of the city just casually out there, waiting for Han to go outside. “You first.”

-

The thing about speaking any of the Wookiee languages is that they’re actually pretty simple: you’ve just gotta yell it all like you’ve woken up with a busted rib and someone else’s hangover.

Chewie insists it’s more complicated than that, and that there’s a whole bunch of formal stuff in the Xaczik dialect that outsiders never bother to learn, but that’s Chewie all over; he’s got nuances. Han don’t got nuances, and isn’t interested in trying to acquire any. For one thing, you can’t flog ‘em later when you’re cash-strapped and set to lose a limb if you don’t get some fuel fast enough. He _has_ sold a kidney a couple of times – always managing to renege on the deal before the actual removal of the organ – but you can’t do anything with a _nuance_ except feel faintly guilty all of the damn time.

Han’s doing okay with picking up bits and pieces of Thykarann though; it’s pretty much just technical language, so he saves it for when they’re doing some particularly suicidal flying and chunks of the Falcon are flying past the window; he’s really got _“we didn’t need that, right?”_ down pat. Sometimes Chewie’s irritated growls back are incomprehensible at this stage, but that’s probably for the best.

“Is there a point to this, Haaaaaaan?” Lando asks, drawing out the sound of his name deliberately obnoxiously. There is nothing about Lando that isn’t deliberately obnoxious, actually.

Han considers that he _was_ trying to explain to Lando that before Chewie gave up drinking with them and sloped off to bed, he called them morons, but he used Xaczik to do it, which means with the formalities and the freakin’ _nuances_ , it’s way more insulting than that. Except that that… that’s depressingly dull, and apparently Han’s gone from being a kick-ass smuggler to a linguistics nerd in the space of whatever that third bottle of green stuff Lando produced from his cape was.

“…no,” he sighs, and rolls onto his back, and has no idea when they ended up sitting on the floor when there’s a perfectly good couch right there and everything. Lando is the worst to drink with.

“You ever think you should get out more?” Lando suggests. He’s propped up awkwardly against the table, still wearing his ridiculous cape with panache, which is a word that wasn’t in Han’s vocabulary until Lando forcibly shoved it in there.

“I get all over the galaxy,” Han protests, “Jabba has me running spice all over the place.”

“And all you do is talk to your Wookiee in the obscure formal form of his planet’s three languages,” Lando points out. “You’re not even getting laid in my cape closet.”

Han considers all this, and worries that he might be sulking. “It’s not your cape closet anymore,” he settles on in the end.

“No? What are you keeping in there?” Lando grins, smug. “Other than dust, I mean.”

The last time Han and Lando misguidedly decided to team up on a score, they bickered so much that even Chewie’s fairly infinite patience broke, and Han posted three capes and a pair of green leather boots out of the airlock before Lando caught him. It’s a wonder they haven’t killed each other yet, actually; Han likes to think that maybe he’s just biding his time.

Lando responded to this by selling another volume of his memoirs, these ones featuring a fellow smuggler called Fan Yolo, whose role is mainly to be less good at things than Lando, to get punched in the face, and to have a lot of very tragic venereal disease. Han doesn’t know what he’s going to do about that yet, but he thinks it’s probably going to involve some expensive tailoring and a flamethrower of some kind.

“D’you have sex in the capes?” he asks, and he was aiming for something scornful, maybe implying that Lando is a ridiculous sham of a human who is embarrassing even when getting laid, but there are those damn nuances again, because he thinks it came out kind of wrong. The look Lando gives him is… interesting.

Han scrabbles for the abandoned bottle between them; it turns out to be empty, and spins around pointlessly on the floor, dribbling the last dregs of green. Chewie will _love_ that.

“That’s for me to know and you to only dream of, Solo,” Lando responds at last, and Han tries to slap at him, and misses, and maybe Lando laughs or maybe he does, crushed and heady and too much and too soon and too late.

-

It turns out that just because Qi’ra and Han have one of those tragic histories they sing shitty songs about, it doesn’t mean that she’ll cut him that much slack. It actually means that she’s happy to give him enough rope to hang himself with, and then she sends in her lackeys with knuckledusters to even the score.

Chewie carries Han back to the _Falcon_ and administers bacta to the worst of the open wounds and sighs sadly and only says _just how terrible a kisser are you_ like three times, and Han pretends to be delirious with pain so that he doesn’t have to reply. He’s still got all his teeth and all his fingers, and overall, they’re up on the month. They might have to try and beg some more time out of Jabba, but he’s gotten away with it more than once; Jabba knows that he’s good for it, when he’s good for it. It’s a fragile balance, but hell, what’s life if you’re not tiptoeing on the edge anyway.

Qi’ra and Jabba aren’t going to turn their knives on each other just yet, happy to keep running their separate organisations, but Han’s aware that he’s going to get caught in the middle if he doesn’t time it right. Still, that can be a problem for Future Han; planning for anything further than the end of his current run has never been his style. He should take up Beckett’s legacy at some point and choose a pointless hobby to pretend to aspire to one day, when he’s finally gotten that last job out of the way, but there’s plenty of time for that.

Lando shows up three days later with his most rakish of grins and a proposition of strip sabacc. 

“You look dreadful,” he tells Han with relish, and flutters his cards between his hands.

“I thought we were actively avoiding each other after the Trandosha Shitshow,” Han replies, and Chewie automatically growls something derogatory about the Trandoshans under his breath, because old habits die hard, after all.

“We’re actively avoiding each other after the Iridonia Shitshow,” Lando corrects him, “the Trandosha Shitshow is That Which We Do Not Speak Of.”

There was a time, Han reflects, when he genuinely thought that winning the _Falcon_ off Lando in a more-or-less fair game of sabacc, bundling the man’s worryingly extensive cape collection into a box, and leaving him and his clothing behind on that backwater planet would be the end of it. He should have known, really, that there’s no losing anything in this lifetime; it always turns up, just when you least expect it.

“Alright,” Han sighs, defeated, and waves a hand, “deal me in.”

“You too, Chewie?” Lando asks, twisting in his seat. “You can’t bluff for shit, but you can take off that bandolier one ammo at a time, if you want.”

Chewie shakes his head and heads off, mumbling.

“I thought my Shyriiwook was getting pretty good, but what did he call us?” Lando asks, shuffling the cards with one last flourish before tossing the first couple of cards across to Han. They’ll be terrible, of course, but Han’s counting on that; he’s all about the long game.

“Another one of his weird formal insults, I don’t even know,” he mutters, and slides a couple of chips toward the centre of the table. 

There’s no point in telling Lando that it turns out the Wookiees have a word for _masochist_ after all.

-

“I hate you,” Lando announces. He says this often enough that Han’s thinking of developing a drinking game based around it; as a bonus, then he’d be drunk, and Lando would be more bearable. “I hate you, I hate this stupid, shitty planet, I hate rocks, I hate sand, I hate dust, I hate the Annaj-Houche Run, I hate the Ayrou, I hate that stupid fucking grin you wear when you think you’re going to get away with something but you’re not, I hate sunlight, I hate _you_.”

Han kicks a boot at the thick, gritty sand around his feet. “You done?”

Lando huffs. “Not necessarily.”

Han laughs, or an approximation of it. It stings a little, breath sticking to his lungs, and the heat here is really oppressive, but they’re alive and pretty much okay and they’re not going to be here _that_ long.

“Chewie’s gonna sort all this,” Han says, scruffing a hand through his hair, loosening a thin trickle of sand. “He’ll catch those bastard Ayrou, take back the haul, and come get us: he knows where we are. We’ll still get the cash.”

When Lando laughs, it’s sharp. “You think Chewie ever gets bored of nursemaiding you?” he demands. “You both know he could do all this without you.”

Han shrugs a shoulder, grits his teeth against the muscle scream. “Someone’s gotta have the language to bargain with and the grin and the face it looks like you can get away with punching.”

Lando shakes his head, folding pissed arms across his chest. His cape was already pretty blinding white before they got here, and the sunlight bouncing off it is making Han’s eyes start to ache. It’s possible some of that ache is from the thugs that stormed off with their merchandise; Han doesn’t think anyone’s broken the skin, but his cheek is distinctly tender and starting to swell. The next time Lando announces that he needs Han to help him do the Annaj-Houche Run, Han is going to ignore him, no matter how much money he claims it’s gonna be worth.

There’s no civilisation where they’ve been dumped, and nothing big enough to provide decent shade; sad, shitty, twiggy little trees that cast thin, depressing shadows on the ground too narrow and too short to be any use. With Lando sulking – even though Han’s pretty sure this is at least half his fault – and nothing to do until Chewie gets here, Han goes over and kicks one. It doesn’t make him feel better.

The trunk is about as thick as his fist, stunted and twisted, and the thin little branches look fragile and sort of pointless. Han spends a moment wondering which Shyriiwook words for tree apply to this tragic shrub with flawed aspirations, and then a moment wondering why everyone thinks Wookiees are terrifying when their language is basically just aggressive-sounding ways of discussing foliage and fur grooming tips, and then another moment wondering why his inner monologue _sounds like this_ , and then goes back over to Lando.

“What are you-” Lando begins furiously, but he’s too late; Han snatches the cape deftly from around his shoulders and carries it back over to the tree. “Solo, haven’t you done enough today?”

Han knots the cape’s ties around the tree’s tiny trunk, and spreads the slick, shiny fabric over the fragile branches. It’s not the best shelter he’s ever made, but there’s a narrow box of darkness at the base of the tree, just big enough to sit in if he keeps his elbows tucked in. He eases himself down onto the hot sand, and lets out a breath as, for the first time in hours, the painful brightness of the sun is no longer directed straight into his eyes.

Lando sulks for a while more, but eventually comes huffing over and sits next to Han; there’s a handful of inches between them that prevent their heat-sticky arms from touching, but it’s a small makeshift awning.

“You alright?” Lando asks at last.

“Sure,” Han replies, closing his eyes and enjoying the way the skin behind his eyelids no longer burns red.

“You’re favouring your left.”

“Might’ve busted a couple ribs,” Han allows.

The sound Lando makes is something between a groan and a sigh and a laugh. “You’re such a hot mess.”

Han can’t exactly argue. “At least you agree I’m hot.”

Lando shakes his head, but it might be slightly fond, somewhere in there. “When we get out of this, I’m going to break your jaw.”

Han lets his head tip back; somewhere behind him, a shower of twigs snap. “Alright,” he says, and grins anyway.

-

“You are such a liar,” Han hisses. “You told me this was a great place to pick up a job!”

Chewie points out that they might still pick up a job; they can definitely network here, after all.

This isn’t the point. “You didn’t tell me it was _Lando Fucking Calrissian’s birthday party_!”

Chewie reminds him that Han wouldn’t have come if he had, and opens the satchel he’s been carrying to reveal that it doesn’t contain spare weaponry, like he told Han it did, but a badly-wrapped present instead.

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Han snaps, “and when exactly, in our very busy lives dodging the Empire, Crimson Dawn, half a dozen smuggling crews, and Jabba’s latest pissed henchmen, did you find time to go _shopping_?”

He might be getting a little hysterical here, but he thinks he’s probably allowed it.

Chewie shrugs and says that he can multitask, unlike certain _other_ people, and adds that he’s not letting Han add his name to the label before he clumps off to presumably find Lando.

Han sighs and huffs, because Chewie insists on being actual friends with Lando, despite Han explaining on multiple occasions that that is definitely not how this whole thing works, and has no issues with dragging Han along for the ride. He’s glad he knows three different ways to call Chewie a traitor in Xaczik now, and the free alcohol here that seems to be flowing in refillable fountains is only going to assuage his mood _slightly_ , dammit.

“For a guy who wears a cheap-ass bandolier and nothing else, your man has good taste,” Lando informs Han later, his grin loose and easy in that way that means he’s very, very drunk, and delighted about it. “I guess his fur does have that whole ombre thing going on, but I figured if he was that fashion-forward, he’d have sorted your sorry mess out by now.”

Han is not nearly so cheerily drunk. “I guess he got you a good gift, then?”

“A very tasteful scarf,” Lando agrees. He squints at Han. “Are you being jealous, Solo? Because I’m not stepping in the middle of your intensely weird co-dependency, it’s okay.”

“It’s not weird,” Han corrects, and then: “or co-dependent. And I’m not jealous!”

Lando pokes his cheek, where Han’s smile might stretch if he was willing to let it out. “You’re sulking about something.”

“You ever think I just don’t like you?” Han asks. It comes out harder than he meant it, less banter, more sharp.

Lando tips his head while he considers it. “I don’t think about you,” he says, but it’s not a good enough lie for even him to sell it cleanly. “I’ve nearly forgiven you for absconding with my girl,” he adds. “I haven’t done anything nearly that bad to you.”

Han takes a sip of whatever sweet burning alcohol he’s drinking; it’s pretty good, he allows. “Does this mean you’re gonna bitch less about the _Falcon_?”

“No,” Lando scoffs, but lets out a breath. “Look, Han, I don’t know if you believe in love at first sight; I don’t, but I saw the way you looked at her, and even I can’t fuck with that.”

Han could attempt to pick that apart, but decides that he doesn’t want to, because then he might have to look at what Lando’s given him, and if he really wants it.

“‘Love at first sight’,” he echoes, laughs. “That what we have, Calrissian?”

Lando laughs, shoulders loosening. “I’ve never liked looking at you, Solo. Your hair’s a fucking tragedy.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Han agrees, clinking their glasses together.

There are drunk people everywhere, money and stakes and ship keys sliding across the sabacc tables, and a band playing the obnoxious music Lando loves that Han thinks sounds like someone flossing with a mandovial string. Han has no doubt that somewhere along the line most of the money changing hands tonight will end up in Lando’s pockets; it’s his party, after all. Han can see Chewie playing dejarik against two humans and a Sullustan. He’s winning; Han hopes he gets enough money to keep them flying until their next run, but that’s a worry for tomorrow morning, anyway.

“ _You_ didn’t bring me a present,” Lando observes archly.

“Nope,” Han agrees. He debates between _I didn’t even know I was coming_ and _maybe I didn’t want to bring you a present_ , discards both, and leaves it at silence.

“Everyone else in here has brought me magnificent and glorious things I’ve never had before,” Lando continues cheerily. “Not you, though.”

“Not me,” Han says.

“I’m gonna get your Wookiee to drag you home by your dreadful hair,” Lando decides, though he’s smirking as he says it, and Han thinks, hell, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Han has punched Lando in the face on at least six separate occasions that he can remember, and probably several more that he can’t, but until now he’s never kissed him. For a long, panicked moment he can’t work out how to do it; Han’s usually charmed anyone he kisses into submission by this point, and he knows by now that Lando is not and will never be charmed by him. It ends up more of a crash than he meant it to be, and maybe he’ll chalk this one up as another punch to the face after all.

“Seriously?” Lando asks with arched eyebrows when Han stumbles back again, more disconcerted than he thinks he intended to be.

“Never had one of those before,” Han reminds him.

“I guess I walked into that,” Lando agrees. “I kinda assumed you’d be better at it, frankly.”

Han bristles. “I’m plenty good.”

Lando waggles his hand from side to side. “Are you, though?”

Maybe this is going to end up in a brawl; at least Han knows where he is with that. “You have no idea what good is,” he asserts.

Lando shrugs. “I just assumed you’d have all the moves, given your, you know, history.” When Han blinks at him, baffled, Lando adds: “you know, your tragic adolescence on the mean streets of Corellia.” He waves his hand significantly at Han.

It clicks. “I was a _thief_ ,” Han snarls, “not a fucking _prostitute_.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, tosses back the rest of his drink. 

“Then you really need to work on not giving out that impression,” Lando replies unrepentantly. “You gonna back up your shitty gift or what?”

“You’re _unbearable_ ,” Han tells him, but it doesn’t stop him from kissing him again, finding an angle where it’s something other than clashing teeth, and, huh. Maybe Lando’s reputation isn’t just shit made up for his terrible books after all.

When they next pull apart, both of them looking just a touch electrocuted, Han can see where Chewie has given up paying attention to the dejarik board in favour of watching the two of them between his fingers. He can see that; this whole thing is like a slow motion shuttle crash.

“This is a terrible idea,” Han muses, even while he’s running light fingers over the impossibly soft material of Lando’s shirt, and Lando isn’t smacking him off.

“You got anything other than bad ideas, baby?” Lando asks, not looking like he minds all that much either way.

Han shrugs, and concedes, and kisses him again. Chewie will probably bitch at him all day tomorrow in every damn dialect Kashyyyk has produced, but, hell: Han hasn’t learned any better and never will, and at some point Chewie’s going to have to realise that.

“Happy birthday,” Han offers, quiet.

Lando laughs, teeth bright white and smug as always. “You know,” he says, “it’s not even my birthday?”

Of course it isn’t. Han sputters anyway. “You’re such a- you’re so- you- you _dick_.”

“Show you mine if you show me yours,” Lando says, forever calmly unrepentant.

Well. Han hasn’t got anything else going on tonight, after all. 

-


End file.
